A few years ago, while researching the Sgt. Pepper story I wondered about the mysterious Joe Ephgrave who painted the famous Pepper drum. I could not find any information about him on the Internet apart from a conspiracy theory wound up in the “Paul is dead” theory that suggested that Paul had died in a car crash on 9th November 1966, and the Beatles had continued recording the Sgt. Pepper album with a substitute. Furthermore, the album’s cover image was really of a funeral with the crowd of mourners standing looking down at the fresh grave with the drum as the headstone. Ephgrave was supposed to be a fusion of “epitaph” and “grave” and thus there was no real person called Ephgrave.
I contacted Jann Haworth, co-creator of the Pepper cover and asked her about Joe. Jann told me that he was a circus artist–what today would be called a signwriter–who had been a friend. She had bought two prints from him and he had painted a tiger on her wardrobe. Jann generously shared a photo of her in her studio around the time of the Pepper cover. The wardrobe is on the right.
Haworth lost contact with Joe after the Pepper cover and spent considerable time trying to find out what had happened to him. There was a rumour that he had emigrated to Australia but the trail went cold. Eventually, Jann found Joe’s son, Joe junior, who sent her this short biography that I reproduce unedited.:
My dad was a great artist but being honest pretty useless with money, I can remember my mum and dad having quite a few arguments over money, there was a time when my mother held down three job, she would work in a florists in the morning, go cleaning in the afternoon and work nights in an old peoples home just to make ends meet. She was always there for me and my sister in the mornings and to put us to bed.
Money was tight in those days and we could not afford many luxuries but every couple of months or so my mum would buy a packet of Chow Mein as a little treat for my sister and I, it was something special to us as we knew mum had gone out of her way to get it for us, seems crazy these days I know, so when you said we could have anything that day that’s the first thing that sprang to mind as to us it was special.
The final chapter in dad’s history was mum and dad split up around 1978-79 from memory and dad moved to Great Yarmouth and lived and worked on the seafront fairground there. I only saw him once after he moved there, I don’t know if he did any more painting while he was there. He died some years later from a brain tumour and my mum and sister went to see him just before he passed away, I was living in Germany at the time and didn’t get to see him but being honest we had very little contact in the last few years.
In 2017, Jann decided to paint an homage to Joe and reproduced his tiger motif on a mock record cover made of wellpap. She made two copies, both now in private cllections (one in Denver and the other in Salt Lake City). Here is Jann Haworth’s original. It’s only the second record cover she has designed.
She shared the design with me, and graciously allowed me to make my own replica, even sending me the file with the record label design. Here’s my version.
We have been trying to find out more details of Joe’s life and Jann put me in touch with Kevin Fabbi, who has been researching Joe’s life and had contact with his remaining family. Kevin generously gave me the dates of Joe’s birth and death. He was born in 1928 and died in 2004. So he would have been 39 when he painted the Pepper drum skins.
Amazingly, it turns out that Kevin has also made a reproduction of Joe’s Tiger motif (far more dramatic than mine!) and he kindly allowed me to reproduce it here:
So, now we have identified the THREE designers behind the Sgt. Pepper cover picture–Peter Blake, Jann Haworth AND Joe Ephgrave. Joe has now taken. his rightful place thanks to Jann’s and Kevin’s research.
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